RANCHO PALOS VERDES, California — I doubt there's anyone inside the tech media game who is truly surprised that Re/code has a new sugar daddy.

It's a prestige brand with one of the best collections of conferences in the business and probably not enough scale to sustain itself alone. Vox Media has deep, money-filled pockets that should help Re/code look forward without nervously glancing back over its shoulder.

A little history on Re/code: It's the brand journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg launched in 2014 when they took the AllThingsD ("D" being for digital) platform they built at the Wall Street Journal away from The Journal. The former parent then proceeded to euthanize the "ATD" brand and Swisher and Mossberg never looked back. Re/code was born.

Without The Journal, Re/code became scoopier and more insidery. If you care about the tech and social media industry, it is a must read. However, even though Swisher has more than a million Twitter followers and has even appeared in HBO's Silicon Valley, Re/code is a relatively small site. Alexa, the Amazon-owned analytics company, lists its U.S. rank as 1,888. The Verge, by contrast is 227 (Mashable is 179).

Why do I mention The Verge? Because Re/code's new parent, Vox, also owns The Verge, along with a bunch of other wildly-popular consumer sites such as SBNation, Eater, Racked and Curbed.

The Verge and Re/code may appear to overlap, but that's only if you think The Verge is still interested in broadly covering the news. After a brief flirtation with general news and after a chunk of the staff moved on (including founder Josh Topolsky), The Verge was reined in by Vox, becoming a more general tech lifestyle site.

Re/code, does product stuff (Mossberg loves his gadgets), but I still think its real strength is in the business of tech, social and media. As such, it plugs a nice hole in Vox's portfolio and may even dovetail with The Verge — though there could still be some casualties.

The acquisition news, by the way, dropped just as Re/code was set to kick off its second annual Code Conference (previously called "D Conference") in Ranchos Palos Verdes in Southern California. The news broke at 3 p.m. PT, hours earlier, apparently, than the Re/code team had intended, but leaks meant that Re/code had to push the button early.

Possibly my favorite internal question about @Recode from @voxmediainc staff so far: "Do they like gifs or are they more serious people?"

With the actual speakers program hours away, I had time to wander the halls of the Terranea Resort and take everyone's temperature on the acquisition. Most Re/coders learned about the acquisition mere hours earlier and then they had to wait for the news to go public. Some senior staffers knew beforehand. When I saw Verge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel, he sounded particularly pumped about working with Mossberg and mentioned "endless possibilities."

Others worried that the acquisition was making Re/code the news, when the purpose of the conference is for others to make news. It certainly was distracting. It was the center of discussion among every cluster of Code Conference attendees.

In one group, a Re/coder noted that Swisher was always quite open about the media brand having discussions with partners. While no one was surprised that Re/code was acquired, many seemed shocked it had happened so soon. Others noted that, without a new parent, Re/code might have needed to go after more funding. Now it likely never has to worry about that again.

Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff joked the only way he could get in to the Code Conference was by buying the Recode.

Image: Mashable, Lance Ulanoff

I also found out that Re/code did not have to give up its NBC universal partnership (the company has invested in Re/code) to join Vox Media. That leaves open the tantalizing possibility that, somewhere down the road, NBC/Universal could buy up Vox. Not that Vox is looking for a buyer, but more established brands like NBC are always looking for ways to go broader and, especially, younger. Brands like SBNation could help them do that. Re/code may not skew younger, but it does lean toward new media and, as NBC has already proven, it has an affinity for the Re/code brand.

When Mossberg and Swisher finally took the stage Tuesday afternoon, they started by addressing the news. Mossberg joked that he just got a Snapchat from Marissa Mayer and the reports were wrong, "Yahoo bought us and, Kara, you're fired." To be honest, the joke fell a little flat.

Swisher said she knew that the media industry was a little crazy, but she'd known Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff for 20 years and called him "a real pioneer."

Bankoff then took the stage and promised, "What you love about Re/code — the site, the conferences — it's not going to change."

Reassuring, I imagine, to Re/code employees and fans, but virtually impossible in the modern world of digital media.

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